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Yet another study has been released that proves that watching Fox News is detrimental to your intelligence. World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, conducted a survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. What's more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation.

The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren't too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region's youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks, let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:

'When a Democrat 'moves to the center,' he is adopting a conservative position - or the language of a conservative position. Even if only the language is adopted and not the policy, there is an important effect.' George Lakoff, Common Dreams

Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a blog post about the "mistake of 1937," the premature fiscal and monetary pullback that aborted an ongoing economic recovery and prolonged the Great Depression. As Gauti Eggertsson, the post's author (with whom I have done research) points out, economic conditions today - with output growing, some prices rising, but unemployment still very high - bear a strong resemblance to those in 1936-37. So are modern policy makers going to make the same mistake?

"Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."- John F. KennedyThere's one thing for sure: 2008 isn't anything like politics as usual.The corporate media (with their unerring eye for the obvious point) is fixated on the narrative that, for the first time ever, Americans will likely end this year with either a woman or a black man headed for the White House. Bloggers are telling stories from the front lines of primaries and caucuses that look like something from the early 60s - people lining up before dawn to vote in Manoa, Hawaii yesterday; a thousand black college students in Prairie View, Texas marching 10 miles to cast their early votes in the face of a county that tried to disenfranchise them. In recent months, we've also been gobstopped by the sheer passion of the insurgent campaigns of both Barack Obama and Ron Paul, both of whom brought millions of new voters into the conversation - and with them, a sharp critique of the status quo and a new energy that's agitating toward deep structural change.There's something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who've been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be - at long last - that Americans have, simply, had enough? Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government - and with it, control of our own future? Is this simply a shifting political season - the kind we get every 20 to 30 years - or is there something deeper going on here? Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we're going to finally win a few? Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions - and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment. In fac

The Paris Commune (French: La Commune de Paris, IPA: [la kɔmyn də paʁi]) was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 (more formally, from March 28) to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution. Debates over the policies and outcome of the Commune contributed to the break between those two political groups.In a formal sense, the Paris Commune simply acted as the local authority, the city council (in French, the "commune"), which exercised power in Paris for two months in the spring of 1871. However, the conditions in which it formed, its controversial decrees, and its violent end make its tenure one of the more important political episodes of the time.

To make drug policies more humane and more effective, the U.S. should rehabilitate non-violent, casual drug users, and undermine the power of organized crime.

Critics of President Obama never tire of blaming him for today's high deficits. But if blame belongs with one president, it belongs with Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush. The chart above, which the New York Times created based upon figures from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, illustrates this point very clearly. But it's worth reviewing the history here, because while it's familiar to most of us who follow politics it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention in the political debate.

Excerpt: 'The only way out of the vicious economic cycle is for government to adopt an expansionary fiscal policy - spending more in the short term in order to make up for the shortfall in consumer demand.' Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

Thousands of New Yorkers were endangered by WTC debris-and government malfeasance.

The Economic Policy Institute, a top nonpartisan think tank, estimates that the deal struck this weekend to raise the nation's debt limit will end up costing the economy 1.8 million jobs by 2012.

I get a little bored repeating over and over that our short-term deficit is almost entirely not Barack Obama's fault. It's mostly the fault of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars, and the financial collapse that happened during the Bush presidency. At this point, though, this is more in the nature of a religious debate than a factual one, and conservatives are going to keep repeating the same tired disinformation about the deficit regardless of any evidence one way or the other. Still, just on the off chance that a few people are still persuadable on this, it's nice of CBPP to update its chart showing the source of the deficit over the next decade. (Farther out than that, Medicare is largely responsible for most deficit projections.) As you can see, by 2013 or so, virtually the entire deficit is due to Bush-era policies/disasters. So cut this out and post it on your refrigerator.

$2.5 trillion deficit-reduction deal brokered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner, and President Barack Obama is grotesquely unfair. It also is bad economic policy. In the midst of a terrible recession, it will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Articles like these are increasingly laying bare the fact that with the most consequential policy decisions of the U.S. government are largely a result of unaccountable institutional forces that are the ground under which both of the two major political parties operate.

What CAFRs reveal is a communist-style policy whereby the US taxpayers surrender enormous assets to the state, who then "invest" these collective trillions that swell in these accounts. Concurrently, taxpayers are informed of budget deficits to either squeeze more taxes from them and/or cut public services. To add insult to injury, the state lies in omission by never reminding Americans of their hard-earned and withheld trillions as they eliminate jobs, reduce education, and attack the quality of our lives.

Mathew Yglesias: CBPP Analysis of John Boehner's Plan: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes that if enacted, John Boehner's debt ceiling plan "could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history." That sounds to me like something that would create strong incentives to not be poor and, indeed, to fully incentive richness. Consequently, we'll have massive economic growth. Right? Think of all the old people who will be willing to do odd jobs, whatever, in order to pay for health care. No more free-riding from grandma and grandpa to slow the economy down. The CBPP adds: This may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. The mathematics are inexorable. ... In short, the Boehner plan would force policymakers to choose among cutting the incomes and health benefits of ordinary retirees, repealing the guts of health reform and leaving an estimated 34 million more Americans uninsured, and savaging the safety net for the poor. It would do so even as it shielded all tax breaks, including the many lucrative tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations. As for the way the debt ceiling talks are going, what a disaster.

Drought could parch close to 70 percent of the planet's soil by 2025 unless countries implement policies to slow desertification, a senior United Nations official has warned. "If we cannot find a solution to this problem... in 2025, close to 70 percent could be affected," Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said Friday. Drought currently affects at least 41 percent of the planet and environmental degradation has caused it to spike by 15 to 25 percent since 1990, according to a global climate report. "There will not be global security without food security" in dry regions, Gnacadja said at the start of the ninth UN conference on the convention in the Argentine capital. "A green deal is necessary" for developing countries working to combat drought, he stressed. The next meeting on the convention is scheduled to take place in South Korea in 2010.

Economic historians will look back on this era as a time when policy-makers damaged Americans' welfare with ideologically driven, self-inflicted wounds.

I don't know the intentions of each of the people taking part in the riots today. I don't know for sure what the intentions of any of them are. But I do know this: every act is a political act. Whether it is intended to make a point about the government's macro-economic policy or intended to allow a pair of trainers to be stolen, the smashing of a window is a clear demonstration of a refusal to buy into society as it stands. However an arsonist explains their flames, whether they burn a building for fun, or with the intention of bringing about revolution, they are saying this: "The world I find myself in is not one in which I have a stake. It is not one I was allowed to help build. It is one which I am happy to burn".